Why is Quiet so Loud?

Basically every single night of Little Man's life, he has fallen asleep in the company of his parents. The voyage to dreamland is not a solo one for him. We went from co-sleeping to rocking him to sleep and, now, every single night for as long as he was too big for the rocking chair, we sit in his room, playing soft piano music until the boy is KOd. Sometimes it is so annoying and I'm done with enabling this arrangement but mostly--it's the best. It's peaceful and bonding and meditative and there is something quite awe-inspiring about being there each night for the graceful drift another human makes from the conscious to the unconscious state. I notice it's also a time when Baby Girl is engrossed in narrative play with her dolls, setting up micro-living rooms where they discuss the latest in American Girl Doll fashion, I assume. This time of quiet, it does something for our son to have one of us there and it does something for our daughter to have us both undisposed . I realize now as I am typing this: it does something for us as parents, too.

Which is to say that I am pretending to discover land that is already well-inhabited territory. I've stumbled upon a thing that is, for all intents and purposes, an element in the periodic table of life that everyone knows about already, that everyone has memorized and understands its usage. So why is the messaging around Quiet so loud?

The magazines tell us how to structure our Me Time, as if it were a bureau dresser from IKEA. Spas tantalize with promises of peace for the price of an hour-long massage. Quiet has been commodified, luxurified. But oxygen is not a luxury, nor are clothes a fringe benefit. Quiet time should not be something that is reserved as in four-star dining. Quiet is a need, a necessary ingredient in wholeness. It is not simply the absence of noise but the intentionality around whatever creates a haven for reflection. So, again, why is the messaging around quiet so loud?

Because we have allowed it to be so. We pretend to steal away private moments to pray, to meditate, to breathe, all the while worried that there might be a gaping hole in the universe we will have to replenish with our busy-ness and idle small talk.

I am here to say that Quietude does not affect our carbon footprint, my friends. The messaging will tell us that to seek a quiet life is a radical act of surrender and even selfishness. But it is one of the very things that we need more of, that we need to drink in and breathe out and become better and braver because we have been quiet.

What if the work to stay relevant was less prized than the work we must do to preserve ourselves in irrelevance? What if Donald Trump relaxed his face for a few minutes, what if Marissa  Mayer took a radically longer maternity leave? What if umpires and baseball managers, instead of squaring off on the mound in disagreement, took a full minute of silence before they tried to settle a dispute about a fly ball? What if we changed the expression "For crying out loud" to "For crying in my corner!" What if quiet were less of a library standard and more the atmosphere of our world?

One of the coolest things I heard a business woman say in the last year was "Sleep is an act of worship." Ruth Simons, an entrepreneur and mother of six boys said that, as an exhortation about leaning in too much to the din of social media and online hyperactivity. Sleep, and in effect, quiet, are extraordinarily ordinary acts that glorify the Heavens for their providence -- in spite of all that we fancy ourselves able to do here as mere mortals. I can tell you that I could use a few more nights of working the evening shift with my little man. While I am supposedly Waiting him out to fall asleep, I am also Becoming Quiet, committing a random and necessary act of worship.

What I plan to do with my lack of Powerball winnings

The doorbell rang at 9 o'clock yesterday,Our neighbor Jordan who always calls me ma'am, could have knocked but he rang, our children long in bed.

Jordan asked for some sugar in order to make Kool-Aid. Because maybe that's too much to go without at 9 o'clock when you're in the fifth grade, enough to force you out the door into the darkness to ring a neighbor's doorbell whose name you only know as ma'am.

I was so happy my husband was home so I could hide, bra-less and he could fetch a literal cup of sugar to give to Jordan for all of his Kool-aid needs.

And that is how I always want it to be: to be asked and tickled to death able to give out from a sweet supply.

Which is why I have not bought a ticket to match my numbers to the queue of balls to watch and wait and see tonight if I should arrange for the U.S. Mint to pour some sugar on me.

Because the thing about scarcity and abundance is not in how much it depletes or enriches but in how quickly and easily it comes to give or take away.

Don't be a killjoy they'll say Here's to your loss and our gain, But for now I can meet my neighbor's gaze the Kool-Aid mustache isn't asking for a cut of what I have not whatever I can give.

To know my neighbor's thirst and to be known as one who can can sweeten the deal, that is my billion dollar winning. My life stands to lose much more than it stands to gain from a powerball, a power fall from wealth for me.

When love languages get lost in translation

"So what do you and your wife fight about?" asked my husband's barber, because he and my husband have that kind of relationship. "Um. Mostly love languages."

"Oh yeah, those are big."

I don't know if that's the conversation verbatim--I wasn't there. I only know the essence of it that Loverpants reported to me. It's true, that's what we mostly Have Disagreements About in marriage. It's not that we dispute what our love languages are or their existence. We just read each other's wrong.

What does disagreement look like for us? It means Loverpants and I get in our invisible canoe and row the oars of our dissonance over and harder into the otherwise still waters of our life's little tributary until we make it out to that Island of Disagreement where we hash things out. There aren't usually tears, perhaps almost always some raising of voices. But there are also a lot of agonizing sighs and pacing back and forth.

That happens when you don't speak the same love language. You take things to mean one thing and they mean something entirely different in sentiment and tone. You expect certain words to be said, certain gestures to be made, and then you realize you are different people who communicate love differently. Like, way differently.

Loverpants is an acts of service kind of guy. He will fill your gas tank, he will call to ask if you need anything from the store, and you will never be without clean laundry. He prefers you to give him your quality time. Not your time divided by other errands or catch-ups with a whole slew of random people. Don't give your time at all if it can't be focused and intentional. That's my guy. He is also good at giving gifts and is horrendously bad at receiving them.

I am a gifts and words kind of gal. I like to give gifts, especially handmade or one-of-a-kind items. I like to give words and receive words of affirmation. I find many of the other love languages not only absent from my heart but also confusing. For example, I often feel oppressed by the time people expect me to spend with them or not knowing when someone is going to leave. I am big into social cues and hate to feel that I am burdening someone by overstaying. I love having company over and even having guests stay overnight but I need to know how many days so that I can pace myself socially. Solitude is oxygen. I also find acts of service a complicated language. I don't ever want people to feel obligated to return an act of service, but I don't want to be treated as a doormat either. I understand this makes me sound like a jerk and there is a certain jerkberry jam spread on my heart, that much is true. Marriage makes one realize this about herself quick-smart.

But all is not bleak.

I'm changing one thing about my life this year in order to learn to speak Loverpants' love language better. I'm planning to get up at an obscene hour to do my workout so that when he gets home from work, I can be more available. I can make some tea and while I'm twirling around the aromatic tea bag, he can tell me about the podcast he listened to on his ride home and what Steve Almond says about patronage and exactly how many pounds of skittles he ate at the 4 o'clock slump. I'm going to give him my quality time, try to speak a language that sometimes makes me hands-wringingly anxious and I'm going to do it by making one change that I hope will spur a few other changes around here.

Learning a new language is not hard. I hear it just takes lots of hours of practice and overcoming the fear of sounding stupid. I'd so much rather risk sounding stupid than practicing lots of hours of actual stupidity, though. More languages spoken and discerned = more love in my life. That doesn't sound stupid to me.